For those of you who can't wait until the Radeon X1950 to debut on the 23rd, ATI has already started to cut pricing on the ASICs for the Radeon X1900 series cards: Radeon X1900 CrossFire, X1900XTX, X1900XT and X1900GT. Essentially, all of the ATI cards have shifted down a price tier, leaving the top $500 price tag open for the Radeon X1950.

The pricing change began to affect some merchants early this week, with the majority of the merchants following suit now. Here are a few of the average price changes over the last few days:

Although the price reduction has mostly affected built-by-ATI cards, Sapphire and PowerColor are also starting to see some movement on the new pricing. Expect to see the rest of the industry follow shortly, and definitely expect to see all pricing adjusted before August 23th. ATI distributors claim there will be some availability of Radeon X1950 on the launch day.

The Radeon X1950 is ATI's first GDDR4 graphics card. The card is expected to fill in the pricing tier of the older Radeon X1900s. Update 08/09/2006: We originally published the release date for Radeon X1950XTX was August 27. This was a typo and the correct date is in fact August 23.

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Some of the new cards are going to come with external power supplies so you won't need to upgrade you internal unit. But the back of your PC will become more of a rats nest of cables, cords, and power bricks.

Hum, you got me thinking about how you could use your set price electricity in your Condo to produce a transportable energy source to sell or for your car. How about a little hydrogen electrolysis in the spare bedroom?

Beleive it or not, it is possible. You can already overclock CPU's that use previous generation processes to 150+ watts on air cooling. And that includes no memory.

You have to realize the memory, running at high clock speeds, is also consuming quite a bit of power. It could easily get to 300w. And of course the chip would probably fry in seconds without a heatsink, but the sink continually draws heat away so it never gets white hot. The cooling demands for the next generation video cards are going to be high.

The entire card will consume 300W, not just the GPU. Granted, the GPU will consume the most energy, but the GDDR will absorb some energy, along with any inefficiencies in the power delivery system on the graphics cards. IIRC, most high-end cards have heat sinks on these components already. If those components are giving off that much heat, then they are likely a decent part of the energy consumption.